In this course, we will explore the poetic spirit of Zen poets such as Ikkyu, Basho and Ryokan as well as some well-known English-language poems such as Keats’s “To Autumn,” Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” and Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli.” The class will be both instructional and experiential, encouraging students in writing their own poems as a way of studying both literature and themselves.

Laura BurgesLaura Burges is a Lay Entrusted teacher who lectures and leads retreats at practice centers in Northern California. Her plays about women in American history, written in poetic form, have been used in classrooms and women's prisons throughout the country. A teacher of children for 30 years, her work has been featured in the PBS documentary The Digital Divide and in the book Teach Our Children Well. She cofounded the Sangha in Recovery Program at SFZC.

R. M. RyanConsidered by The New York Times one of the poets who writes “at the juncture of rapture and rupture,” R. M. Ryan studied with Pulitzer-Prize-winner Howard Nemerov. He is the author of two books of poetry—Goldilocks in Later Life and Vaudeville in the Dark—and of a novel—The Golden Rules, which is currently in development as a movie. Believing that poets and Buddhists need to live and work in the world, he has held a wide variety of jobs—automobile assembler, forklift driver, German translator, corporate trainer, to name a few. He has been practicing Zen since 2009 and Yoga since about 1990.